One of the reasons firefighting persists is that its true cost is hard to see. On the surface, work still gets done. Deadlines are met, reports are delivered, emails are answered. From the outside, the organisation appears functional, even efficient.
But this apparent productivity is misleading.
Firefighting shifts costs away from budgets and plans and onto people, quality, and trust. Because those costs are diffuse and slow to surface, they are easy to ignore.
Quality quietly degrades
When teams are constantly reacting, quality is the first casualty.
Work is rushed. Checks are skipped. Decisions are made with partial information. People rely on workarounds and assumptions because there is no time to do things properly. Individually, these compromises seem small. Collectively, they add up.
In data work, this shows up as dashboards that need constant explanation, reports that require caveats, and numbers that technically exist but are not fully trusted. In operational work, it shows up as processes that “mostly work” as long as the right person is watching them closely.
Firefighting keeps things moving, but it erodes confidence in the outputs over time.
Mistakes create more work, not less
A reactive environment is fertile ground for avoidable errors.
Mistakes made under pressure rarely disappear. They resurface later as reconciliations, corrections, rework, and damage control. Each fix consumes more time, which further reduces capacity, which increases pressure, which increases the likelihood of the next mistake.
This is how teams end up permanently busy without ever feeling on top of their workload.
Firefighting does not solve problems. It often multiplies them.
Knowledge becomes fragile
In firefighting cultures, systems are held together by people rather than design. Key knowledge lives in individuals’ heads. Only certain people know how to fix certain issues quickly. Documentation falls behind reality. Training is postponed. Succession planning becomes theoretical.
This creates hidden risk. When someone is ill, leaves, or simply burns out, the system falters. The organisation discovers too late that resilience was never built into the process, it was borrowed from individuals.
Morale erodes quietly
Perhaps the most damaging cost is the one least likely to appear in any report.
Constant firefighting is exhausting. It removes any sense of progress or mastery. People work hard but feel as though they are standing still. Over time, motivation shifts from doing good work to simply getting through the day.
High performers cope the longest, which often means they absorb the most pressure. Eventually, they disengage or leave. When they do, the loss feels sudden, but the conditions that caused it have been in place for years.
Why this is so easy to underestimate
Firefighting hides its own damage because it looks like effort.
Busy calendars, fast responses, late nights, and heroic saves are visible. The work that never happens is not. The improvements that are postponed indefinitely are not. The learning that could have prevented the next crisis is not.
Because the organisation keeps functioning, the system is assumed to be working.
It is not.
Firefighting is a sign that capacity is already being exceeded. Treating it as normal only ensures the damage continues to compound.
In the next article, I will shift the lens slightly and argue that extra capacity should be understood as risk management, not indulgence, and why resilient organisations plan for slack rather than hoping they can cope without it.